


Take my hand (we’ll dive into the sea)

by the-noble-idiot (1004_Angel)



Series: Klance AU Month 2019 [3]
Category: Voltron: Legendary Defender
Genre: Childhood Friends, Friends to Lovers, M/M, Sendak's a dick, Sendak's a poacher, human Lance, mermaid au, mermaid keith, minor biphobia, minor homophobia, non-graphic description of violence against animals, what are tenses
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-02-12
Updated: 2019-02-12
Packaged: 2019-10-26 19:19:54
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,376
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17751932
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/1004_Angel/pseuds/the-noble-idiot
Summary: A mer has four gifts for humanity.The tear of a mermaid gifts strength.The scale of a mermaid gifts invulnerability.The kiss of a mermaid gifts breath underwater.The heart of a mermaid gifts long life.If one possess all four? No one knows, for no one has ever possessed the heart of a mermaid.





	Take my hand (we’ll dive into the sea)

**Author's Note:**

> Don't tell me how many days late this is for Klance AU Month, I don't even want to know. If you want to know why it's so late, it's because it's a whopping 5k that I didn't mean to happen but did so yknow whatever. I loved this idea (kinda inspired by the PotC 4 movie where they need a mermaid tear to activate the fountain of youth) and kept expanding on it until it was a week late and honestly I love this too much to care.
> 
> Brief mention of homophobia/biphobia, if you would like to skip, stop at "With growing up came complicated relationships with peers" and pick back up at the next break. Comment and I'll fill you in on what happens!
> 
> Anyway, please enjoy!
> 
> Title from "Mermaid" by Skott

 

Lance is eleven years old when he receives the Kiss.

Something pulls Lance toward the ocean, a feeling in his chest that swells and expands whenever he looks out at the waves spitting onto the shoreline, and even farther out where the sails of royal ships disappear beyond the horizon with adventure awaiting them. His mother had done everything she could to keep her son safely on shore with the rest of their family to take on the family trade as tailors, but Lance’s father lets out a bellowing laugh and claps his hand on Lance’s shoulder and takes him aboard his ship.

It’s a simple journey. A month at the longest.

At least, it should have been.

A tempest struck just a few days after their departure. Wind howled, rain stung his skin like knives, flowed into his eyes and made it impossible to see the barrel that came rolling straight at him.

He shouldn’t have been on deck in the first place. His father had instructed him to stay in the cabin where it was safe, but Lance wanted to help. His mother told him it was one of his best qualities, but also his worst fault. Lance never understood what she meant by that though, not until the barrel was crashing into him, barely giving him a moment to cry out before he was pitched over the rail and down into the fathoms below.

The sea was calmer down here, but no less scary. The water swirled around him with an ice cold grip, numbing Lance’s limbs almost instantly. He kicked to the surface, only managing to get a few gulps of air before he was sucked under again. His legs wouldn’t move, weighed down by his clothing and not strong enough to combat the swirling currents.

Lance held his breath for as long as he possibly could, until his chest and throat burned and he inhaled on reflex, taking in lungfuls of water that he tried to choke out but only managed to suck more in. His vision began to blacken around the edges, though whether it was from the darkness of the sea or his impending drowning, Lance didn’t know.

He wanted to cry, but he was quickly losing consciouses.

A flash of red.

Was he bleeding?

A grip on his forearm, something strong curling around his right leg.

Lance’s eyes are barely open now, but there’s definitely something in the water with him. His mind is too waterlogged to struggle against the creature’s grip on him, which just makes him want to cry more.

“Shiro’s gonna kill me.”

Lance doesn’t understand what is happening.

The grip on his forearms tighten. Something slimy presses against his mouth, slightly cold, like the fish scales Marco dared him into licking once. His mouth is forced open, and then he is struck by a sensation even more painful than drowning. He wants to scream, but whatever is against his mouth is preventing anything more than muffled cries to escape. His neck burns, like a knife is being dragged across the soft skin.

And then, he can breathe again.

Whatever is against his mouth pulls back. Lance heaves in mouthfuls of air — no, not air, _water._ He’s definitely still underwater, but he’s not drowning anymore. Water flows into his mouth, down his throat, but he feels it tickling the sides of his neck as it is expelled with every exhale. The darkness on the edges of Lance’s vision recedes, and he finally gets a look at whatever had given him fucking _gills._

It’s a boy. A boy no older than himself, though perhaps it’s hard to tell based on the patchwork bright red scales that crawl their way up his throat and over his cheek. Black hair swirls around his head like a halo, framing elongated ears that extended from either side of his head like fins, a pale red membrane holding it all together. The boy is gripping Lance firmly, nails long as they dig into his skin. Fins extend from the backs of his forearms, the same pale red as his ears, outlined with the same patchwork scales that work their way up his biceps, over his shoulders, down his chest to connect with…

Lance gulps in a heaping amount of seawater, coughing up what he can’t exhale. “You’re a—“

“And you’re a human,” the merman says, his bright red tail tightening around Lance’s right leg. “A human I just gave my only Kiss to, so you’d better use it wisely.”

Lance knew the fairytales. The kiss of a mermaid grants breath underwater. He stopped believing those stories when he was ten, but damn if he doesn’t believe them now.

“Only…?”

"Mers only have one of each Gift to give, didn't you know that?"

Lance shakes his head, baffled by this new information. This mer... just...

The merman flicks his violet eyes away from Lance, looking up to where the hull of Lance’s ship is still partially visible as it thrashes in the storm above. “I’ll get you back to your ship.”

“Wait—!”

The mer ignores him. His grip moves from Lance’s forearms to around his shoulders, hugging the human tightly to his chest as he gives a powerful swipe of his tail, and the two of them are shooting through the water like a bullet from a gun. Lance can’t help but let out a whoop in delight, the feeling of water shoving down on him as they swim against the current to catch up with the ship.

Lance’s new mer friend lets out a laugh too.

They pull alongside the ship, their heads breaking the surface. It takes Lance a few extra coughs to remember how to breathe air and not water. Closing the new gills on his neck is like wiggling his ears, learning how to control new muscles that will simply come with practice. The sea still roils, but not as angrily as before. Using their combined strength, Lance manages to grab onto a low rung meant for scraping barnacles off the hull. He pulls himself up with one arm, hooking his elbow around the rung above.

He looks down at his mer friend, who watches onward to make sure Lance has safely secured himself.

“Will I see you again?” Lance asks above the din of the storm.

The mer cocks his head, his wet hair plastered to the pale skin of his forehead and shoulders. “I don’t know.”

“Can I get your name then?”

The mer shrugs, and lets out a cacophony of screeches and clicks that has Lance resisting the natural urge to let go of the rungs and cover his ears. When the mer finishes, he looks on expectantly as if waiting for Lance to repeat the name back to him, which Lance is pretty sure he doesn’t have the vocal chords to even try to replicate. He instead latches on to the first couple syllables that sounded something like “ _Keeeeeexxxxschlls”_ and decides,

“Okay, Keith,” he calls downward. “I’m Lance! I live on the island of Costa Luna, and I’ll be on under the west beach pier in a month! See you then!”

Without waiting for a proper response, Lance begins to climb back up to the main deck. It’s slow going, with the wind and the rain still pelting at his body, but at least the ship has stopped rocking. Just before pulling himself back over the rail, Lance glances down once more.

Keith is gone, but Lance thinks he sees a flash of red beneath the waves.

* * *

Lance receives the scale when he’s sixteen.

His mother never let him go back out to sea after the incident with the storm, and this time his father was more inclined to agree. Lance was prohibited from going to sea ever again, only barely managing to convince his mother to take the rowboat out, as long as he didn’t stray beyond the reef.

He was alright with that, for the most part. At first it was torturous, watching the sailors set off without him, his friends getting their start as cabin boys at fourteen while Lance stayed at home sewing. He liked sewing, he really did, but he much preferred sailing.

No one believed him when he said he received a kiss from a mermaid, at least not until he showed his parents his newfound gills and his mother fainted. He keeps them covered with high-collared shirts and scarves, if not for his own safety then for Keith’s. If the villagers found out Lance had received a Mermaid’s Kiss, he and Keith could become targets for greedy aristocrats, or worse, mer poachers.

Keith was the only solace Lance had on his tiny island. That first night Lance had waited beneath the pier on the western beach had been one of the most anxiety-inducing of his life, besides almost drowning of course. But right when he was about to call it a night, a flash of redbeneath the waves caught his vision, and Keith pulled himself up onto a small rock, close enough to shore to converse easily but still far enough away for him to make a quick escape.

The two had become fast friends, spending almost every evening together on that beach, exchanging cultures and funny jokes. Puberty treated both of them well; Lance grew taller, shoulders broadening and the lines of his face sharpening. Keith grew longer as well, sprouting new fins on his back and on either side of his tail that flowed through the water like silk. He let Lance touch them once; definitely felt like slimy fish.

With growing up came complicated relationships with peers. More than once Keith showed up to their meetings with bruised skin and bite marks in his shoulders. Lance’s quickly got on the bad side of some bullies at school when they caught him making out with Ross behind the bleachers, now often the brunt end of quite a few homophobic jokes.

“I like girls, too,” Lance mumbles to Keith one evening, both of them settled at the bottom of a small tide pool glowing red in the setting sun. Lance has gotten used to his gills, no thanks to Keith’s pointers (“ _You_ try explaining how to breathe!”), not choking quite as much. “I just… I think boys are pretty, too.”

Keith hums as he lounges on a rock a few paces below Lance, picking at the mossy stone for morsels. “In Altea gender doesn’t matter to us. Most mers can change their reproductive organs to suit their needs.”

Lance tucks his head into the crook of his elbow. “How nice.”

Keith looks up at that, eyebrows knitted in concern. “The Lance I know would have made a dick joke or something, is everything okay?”

Lance exhales through his nose, bubbles rising quickly to the surface. “They told me to go to the park after school. They said they have a way to make me not like boys anymore.”

Keith’s fists clench, sharp teeth sliding into view as he curls his lip. “Don’t go to the park, Lance.”

“If I don’t they’re just going to find me at school. It’s better if I go and just pretend that whatever they do to me worked.” Lance doesn’t know what’s tears and what’s tide pool anymore. “I don’t want to be made fun of, anymore.”

Keith looks terribly introspective, staring daggers into the ocean floor as he wrestled with some kind of internal conflict. Finally, with a deep howl in Mermish that to Lance sounds like a frustrated growl, he sits up and reaches toward the patch of scales at the base of his neck. He screws his eyes closed and with a hard yank, pulls free a scale, slightly larger than the others and shimmering red even in the low light.

He meets Lance’s eyes as he offers him the scale. “Take this.”

Lance blinks at him. “What?”

Keith wrinkles his nose. “Do you want the Scale of a mermaid or not?”

Lance’s eyes widen as the realization sinks in. “Keith no…”

“It’s not like I can put it back, so just shut up and take it."

Lance sucks on his bottom lip. “Are… are you sure?”

Keith reaches upward to press his free hand against Lance’s shoulder. “I don’t want you to get hurt,” he says, voice quiet. “This is the only thing I can do to help.”

Seeing the earnestness in Keith’s eyes, Lance finally relents. He opens his hand, and lets Keith press the scale into his palm.

Lance’s skin burns even as it is soothed by the waters surrounding him. He watches as the scale fuses itself into Lance’s palm, a ripple effect flowing through his skin as patches of scales not unlike Keith’s, though Lance’s were a shimmering blue, slowly appeared on his skin, emerging from beneath the epidermis like bubbles rising to the surface. It patterns his forearms, he feels them forming on his back and shoulders.

When the burning fades, Keith lets go of his hand so Lance can examine his new fishy traits. “And I thought gills were weird.”

Keith cracks a smile. “Stay safe,” he whispers, and Lance pulls him into a hug.

 

(Lance comes back two days later with not even a scratch. The bullies had tried to “beat the gay” out of him, only to run screaming when their bats shattered to splinters the moment they made contact with Lance’s body.

Keith preens.)

* * *

Lance receives the tear when he’s twenty.

It was easy to pass the scales off as intricate tattoos, especially once he entered college. It was look but don’t touch, it was “Lance how did you not break your nose from that fall?” and “Just lucky I guess!” He still keeps the scarves around his neck, though now he’s expanded to turtlenecks, and if wearing turtlenecks in summer makes people think he’s hiding hickies, well. He can live with that.

He goes to a university an hour away from his hometown. It’s a small liberal arts college, barely a thousand students, but it has a decent marine biology program (and for the record, Lance’s major in no way was influenced by Keith. At all. Nope). As such, his and Keith’s meetings went from several times a week to weekends, much to Keith’s displeasure.

“Don’t you have duties down in Altea?” Lance asked him the week before he left for his first year of college.

“I mean yeah, but that’s boring.” Keith’s cheeks flushed a red so bright it blended into his scales. “Seeing you is the highlight of my day, is all.”

Lance tries not to read too much into it as he buries his feelings and says, “I look forward to seeing you, too.” He hopes mermaid hearing can’t detect the fluster beating of his heart.

He’s home for the summer between his sophomore and junior years of college when it happens.

It’s a windy day, making it a struggle for Lance to keep his scarf around his neck. He looks strange, wearing a scarf (even one as light as his) in the middle of a dreadfully hot summer, but he’s used to the stares now.

A particularly strong gust of wind wrenches the scarf from his shoulders, sending it fluttering down the sidewalk. Lance must look like quite the spectacle, keeping his shoulders pulled up to his ears as he scrambles after the scarf. He puts it back on immediately after catching it, doing a quick check to make sure no one noticed his gills.

Luck is not with him today.

He sees them just before he’s about to continue on his way to see Keith. A group of men, tall and bulky like pro-football players. The biggest of them has a prosthetic arm, and a bright red eyepatch that sends chills down Lance’s spin. He knows that guy, at least his reputation as the most successful mer poacher. Tears go for billions on the black market, scales, even not the ones that grant invulnerability, go for trillions. Mers are murdered and stuffed and displayed in collections, or kept as pets, or, as he hears is a delicacy in some parts of the world, mermaid tail meat is particularly sweet.

And his one good eye is trained right on Lance.

Lance bolts. He under no circumstance can allow himself to be caught by these guys, and he certainly can’t let them find Keith. He avoids the beach, turning back inland, hoping that Keith has the good sense to go back home when Lance doesn’t show up to their meeting.

He hears the poachers sprinting after him. Lance has spent a lifetime running from his siblings, his nieces and nephews, so he likes to think that he’s a pretty fast guy. He weaves between civilians and ducks behind cars, but still the men are after him.

Lance whips around a corner, only to crash into the body of the thinnest of the three poachers, but no less strong. Fingers grip him painfully by the biceps, holding firm even as Lance kicks and shouts and struggles to free himself. The other two catch up, the eyepatch man coming forward as Lance is whipped around in his captor’s grip to face him, eyes glaring.

“Never thought I’d see a Gifted person in this town, but then I know there’s a sizable colony of mers in these waters, so I suppose it’s not too unlikely.”

The man rips Lance’s scarf away, running his fingers over his gills, smirking with they flutter against the touch. He presses his fingers to the small patch of blue scales near the juncture of Lance’s neck and shoulder, and lets out a low whistle. “Kiss _and_ the scale, huh. You’ve been busy.”

“Recon it’s the same mer?” The second poacher asks.

“Likely,” the leader says, and straightens. “A mer that’s already given away their kiss won’t be worth much, but we can still get a tear out of ‘em before the main auction.”

“Don’t you dare hurt him,” Lance growls.

“Oh, it’s a him? Even better, those are rare.”

The leader motions to his lackeys. “Take him to the beach.”

Lance struggles the whole way there; he struggles as he’s shoved into a white van (because of course it’s white), he struggles as they bind his mouth. He struggles as he is dragged from the van, hot sand beneath his feet and the smell of salt in the air.

_Please don’t be here, please don’t be here,_ Lance prays as he watches, wide eyed and cheeks tear streaked, as the poachers pull nets and spears and harpoons and other nasty looking toys from their storage containers. And then they’re off, down toward the shore. Lance’s eyes flash for signs of red, but he sees none.

“Mermaid!” The eyepatch man calls. “I have your Gifted. Come out now, and no harm will come to him.”

The gag is pulled from Lance’s mouth. “Go away, Keith!” Lance yells. “I’m fine, don’t come out!”

“Aw, you gave it a name,” the leader chuckles. “How sweet.”

“He’s not an _it,_ and if you even think about hurting him…”

“Oh, I’m thinking of doing a lot more than that.”

“Fuck yo-!”

Lance cries out as a fist connects with the side of his face. He may be invincible thanks to the scale fused to the inside of his palm, but it still hurts to get hit.

Something splashes near the cove, a flash of red. Lance’s eyes widen. _Keith, no—!_

“Let’s go,” the leader motions to the second poacher, as the two of them walk the few feet down to the shoreline, nets and spears at the ready. Lance struggles more in the third poacher’s grasp, watching helplessly as they cast their net, harpoons at the ready. Not even ten minutes go by and the surface of the water moves, and then Keith’s tail is not the only red thing in the water.

“Lance!” Keith screeches, his tail slapping uselessly against the water as the poachers drag him by the biceps up into the sand, beaching the thrashing mer. A sharp harpoon pokes out of his tail near the fin, thankfully not bleeding too much but still enough to clot the sand together beneath him. A beached fish is a dead fish, ripe for the pecking, and both Lance and Keith know it. The poacher that still has his hands on the back of Lance’s neck and wrists chuckles as he cheers on his buddies.

Lance can see Keith is struggling not to cry in fear and anger, face twisted and teeth bared even if his eyebrows are drawn upward. It would be dangerous if these men got their hands on the tear of a mermaid; then they would truly be in trouble. Strength of that magnitude, on top of the strength they already possessed (enough to drag a fully grown merman on to the beach), and there would be nothing neither Lance nor Keith could do.

Keith is hissing choice curse words in Mer as the poachers bind his arms behind his back and lash his tail down, not bothering to remove the harpoon, in a position that looks painful judging by the wince that flashes across Keith’s face.

“Keith!”

“Shut up,” the poacher behind Lance orders, shaking his neck and crushing his gills painfully. 

Keith hisses out a sound that sounds close to Lance’s name. 

“You’re hurting him!” Lance throws his head back, feeling the crown of his head connect with his captor’s nose. The man cries out, one hand instinctively going to his face. Grip weakened, Lance twists free, kicks the guy in the dick for good measure, and rushes to Keith’s side.

“Keith, please tell me you’re okay.”

“Never better.”

“Look at this shit,” one of the other poachers says. “Imagine being in love with a fucking mer, what kind of messed up shit is that.”

“C’mon, Sendak,” the third poacher says. “Let the little bastards have one more touching moment before we turn his boyfriend into sushi.”

“Don’t listen to them,” Lance murmurs, running his thumbs over the tiny scales that color Keith’s cheeks. “Everything is going to be fine.”

“Lance… I’m scared…”

Strong, willful, prideful Keith is admitting that he is scared, and wow if that doesn’t spear Lance right through the gut.

“Lance… look at me…”

Lance shakes his head, eyes squeezed tightly shut. If he looks he’ll cry, and if he cries—

“ _Look.”_

Lance looks.

On Keith’s cheek, a single tear, gritty from salt and sand but undeniably a tear.

Lance searches Keith’s face for some kind of hint that this is not what he means, that this is just a fluke and he wants Lance to wipe it away before the poachers can bottle it for the highest bidder. But none of that is there. His eyes are on fire, burning in anger, fear, determination, and something lying just beyond that Lance can’t put a name to yet. But Lance understands.

“Okay.”

He leans forward and presses his lips to Keith’s cheek, licking the tear into his mouth.

The feeling is not like he’s being sliced open, or that he’s burning. Instead, Lance feels like he just woke up from the best sleep of his life. Limbs weighed down by exhaustion, shoulders sagging with the weight of the world, it all fades as energy rushes through his blood.

“Thank you,” he whispers, and Keith drops his head into Lance’s hand, too exhausted from his struggle to move.

“All done?” the one called Sendak growls. “C’mon punk, you’re coming with us too. People will pay nicely to have a pet with two Gifts.”

Sendak’s hand on his shoulder jolts Lance into motion. Keith slumps to the sand as Lance straightens, socking Sendak in the jaw and sending him sprawling to the ground, out cold with a bruise already blossoming on his chin. 

The other two poachers don’t last long at all. He ties them together with the same ropes they had used to bind Keith, dragging them a little further up the beach but not out of sight. 

“Keith!” Lance falls to his knees at Keith’s side, hands worrying over his…

_Imagine being in love with a fucking mer._

…friend.

“Keith, please tell me you’re okay.”

Keith’s hair is plastered to his skin, gritty with sand and salt, tail bloody and drying out rapidly by the minute, but his eyes are open, and he’s looking at Lance with such fondness in his eyes that Lance’s heart stutters in his throat.

“I’m more worried about you.”

“Invincible, remember?”

“And now super strong, too.”

“Don’t say things like that lightly, Keith,” Lance laughs, finally shedding a few tears of his own. “We need to get you fixed up.”

“Know how to bandage a tail?”

“No, but I bet you do. I’ll carry you to the tide pools so you can show me what seaweed to use.”

“Yeah. Yeah, okay.”

* * *

Keith and Lance float belly-up just below the surface of the water, Lance’s body pulled chest-to-back against Keith as he gently flaps his still-healing tail, keeping them moving in lazy circles. The sun glare through the shimmering surface, sparking off in intricate patterns and casting their bodies in a cool blue light that glints off their scales and turns the water purple.

“What are you thinking about?” Lance asks quietly after a few minutes of this.

Keith whispers something Lance can’t hear, breathing out what Lance has come to learn as a Mermish curse.

“I didn’t catch that, sorry.”

Keith growls lowly into Lance’s shoulder, and in a powerful sweep of his tail, they’re breaking the surface. Lance rubs the salt from his eyes, turning to tread water on his own so he can face Keith properly.

“Lance… there’s something I need to tell you, and I would like you to stay quiet until I’m done. Can you do that?”

“I dunno, Keith, asking me to not talk is a pretty tall order.”

Keith splashes him. “Please?”

Lance spits out the water that got into his mouth. “No promises, but yeah, I’ll try. What’s on your mind?”

Keith averts his gaze, rubs his fingers together nervously, and then opens his mouth.

“I’ve given you a tear for strength,” Keith whispers, running his scaly thumbs over Lance’s cheeks. “A scale for protection.”

“Keith…”

The mer barrels on. “I gave you a kiss the first time we met, do you remember?”

Lance nods. How could he possibly forget? He’s spent the last several weeks after the poacher attack wondering would it would be like to taste those lips without danger of drowning. 

Keith’s tail wraps around his leg, supporting his body as they float aimlessly“Lance… you saved my life.”

“And you saved mine,” Lance grins. “Now we’re even.”

Keith shakes his head. “I want give you my heart, Lance.”

Lance jerks a little, only prevented from sinking thanks to Keith’s tail, not that it would have mattered. “W-what?? You want me to cut open your chest? Like hell I’m doing that!”

Keith huffs a laugh, his warm breath smelling of raw fish. “There’s more than one way to give someone a heart.”

It takes a few moments of staring into Keith’s iridescent eyes, shining like sunlight off the crest of a wave, before Lance finally understands his meaning.

“Oh,” he says elegantly.

“Oh? That’s it?”

“It’s just…” Lance clenches and unclenches a fist. “No one’s ever possessed the heart of a mermaid before. Sure long life is great but I also have the Kiss, Tear, _and_ Scale, none of which I asked for by the way. The only reason you gave me a tear was to save our own asses.”

“Which is why I gave it to you.”

“My _point_ is, Keith, that if you do this, I’ll possess all four. There’s no precedent for any of this, what will happen to me?”

Keith shrugs. “I don’t know either. All I know is that I can’t swim another day knowing my heart doesn’t belong to me anymore.” He takes Lance’s hands in his own, doing his best to interlace their fingers over the thin membrane that stretches between the mer’s fingers. “In fact, it hasn’t belonged to me in a long time.”

“Keith, are you—?”

“I gave you my heart years ago, Lance,” Keith says, pressing their foreheads together. “Now all that’s left is for you to accept it.”

Lance huffs out a small laugh, letting go of Keith’s hand so he can press it to his cheek instead. “Only if you accept mine.”

Keith blinks his dual eyelids, a sight Lance has never quite gotten used to. “You—“

“Oh my god, Keith.”

Lance slides his hand from Keith’s cheek to the back of his neck, pulling the mer in for a proper kiss.

The effect is immediate. Lance’s whole body feels warm, from his lips all the way down to his toes. Keith responds in kind, his tail tightening around Lance’s legs and arms gripping his shoulders. They sink back beneath the waves, but Lance doesn’t feel cold. He feels like he’s on fire, his legs aren’t bending like they usually do, but he doesn’t care because Keith is kissing him, and he’s kissing Keith. No one is dying, no one is drowning, it’s just them and the sea turtle a few meters below them.

It’s when Keith finally unwraps his tail from Lance’s legs, their mouths parting with a flurry of bubbles, that Lance finally notices. Keith is looking at him like… well, like he’s never seen him before. His eyes rake over him, to his eyes and ears, down his chest and his swimsuit which _excuse me that’s private mister._

Except his swimsuit is gone. Lance can’t feel it clinging to his legs.

Leg. Singular. Very long, thick, slimy leg.

Lance looks down and almost screams.

His tail is a bright cerulean blue, the fins reminiscent of a blue betta fish that ripple in the water gracefully whenever he moves. His arms grew fins too, his scales extended from his arms all the way down his chest, the tan skin slowly giving way to blue. He pats the side of his head, and yep, his ears feel like how Keith’s look. He blinks, and the water turns clearer, not as dark, and he can see the bioluminescence floating all around them in an almost etherial setting, like it’s just him and Keith floating through space.

“Keith, I’m…”

“You’re…”

“Oh my god, I’m a _mermaid._ Or am I a merman, is there a gendered thing going on here, are there such things as non binary merpeople oh god Keith this raises so many new questions—”

“So this is what happens when a human accepts the heart of a mermaid,” Keith muses.

A thought suddenly strikes Lance, and his excited rambling ceases for a moment. “…I can turn back right?”

Keith swims closer, wrapping their webbed fingers together. He tugs a little, demonstrating a strong swipe of his tail to get them moving. Lance follows the gesture, and he shoots forward, feeling every drop of water move against his fins.

Keith giggles at his flailing. “You’re like a little guppy.”

“I might as well be, I have brand new muscles to figure out.”

“Figure them out on the way back to shore?”

It’s going to take a lot more practice to master his new body, but Lance makes it to shore. He army-crawls his way up onto the beach with Keith hanging back still in the surf. A few panicked minutes remain when Lance doesn’t change back, but apparently he just needs to dry off and endure an awkward jelly-ing sensation in his lower body and his legs will be back to normal, swimsuit intact.

Keith pulls himself out of the surf and onto a small rock outcropping, scales gleaming in the sun and casting him in a warm glow. Lance approaches, pulling Keith down into another kiss that Keith is more than happy to participate in.

“I can finally show you Altea,” Keith whispers against his lips. “Introduce you to Shiro, and Allura…”

Another kiss. “I look forward to it.”

Keith smiles at him, and Lance smiles back.

His chest feels full and warm, like two hearts are beating there.


End file.
